Gesture - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2013

Co-speech pointing actions have been under-analysed or ignored in language description and linguistic theory and this has led to an over-interpretation of their role and status in signed languages as signs belonging to particular grammatical classes, such as pronouns, determiners, and locatives. I argue that the pointing signs found in signed languages are not fundamentally different from the pointing actions found in the composite utterances of spoken languages in their face-to-face mode. I show how pointing signs and pointing actions are both symbolic indexical signs (signs that have partly conventional elements and partly contextual elements and are thus hybrids of conventional and non-conventional signs). I conclude that pointing signs are not a fundamentally different kind of phenomena when they occur in signed language composite utterances (so-called ‘linguistic’ pointing) compared to when they occur in spoken language composite utterances (so-called ‘gestural’ pointing).

This article examines the relation between ideophones and gestures in a corpus of everyday discourse in Siwu, a richly ideophonic language spoken in Ghana. The overall frequency of ideophone-gesture couplings in everyday speech is lower than previously suggested, but two findings shed new light on the relation between ideophones and gesture. First, discourse type makes a difference: ideophone-gesture couplings are more frequent in narrative contexts, a finding that explains earlier claims, which were based not on everyday language use but on elicited narratives. Second, there is a particularly strong coupling between ideophones and one type of gesture: iconic gestures. This coupling allows us to better understand iconicity in relation to the affordances of meaning and modality. Ultimately, the connection between ideophones and iconic gestures is explained by reference to the depictive nature of both. Ideophone and iconic gesture are two aspects of the process of depiction.

This paper deals with the uses, in Japanese conversation, of a practice of tracing the shape of orthographic items in mid-air or on the palm using the index finger. Drawing on naturally occurring videotaped conversation, instances are analysed with regard to visibility, attention and co-gesture talk. It is proposed that the various usages are distributed along a continuum ranging from depiction to framing. A fine-grained sequential analysis of this practice in the context of repair reveals that it is employed as an integral component of a response that conforms the type of information made relevant in the enquiry. It can also constitute an interactional resource which recipients closely monitor and orient to, and which plays a central role in achieving mutual understanding.

Yes and no, or acceptance and refusal, are widespread communicative skills that are common across cultures. Although nodding and shaking the head are common ways to express these seemingly simple responses, these gestures develop later than others such as pointing. We analyzed diary observations from eight infants to investigate the origins of these gestures, why they develop later than other early gestures, and why nodding the head to indicate yes develops later than shaking the head for no. We found that young infants were able to shake their heads side-to-side, but they did not use this movement to communicate refusals at first. Infants had difficulty learning the nodding movement, but they could perform the physical movement before using it to communicate yes. These gestures developed along different trajectories with shaking the head for no emerging between 13 and 15 months and nodding for yes between 16 and 18 months.

Teachers’ gestures are an integral part of their instructional communication. In this study, we provided a teacher with a tutorial about ways to use gesture in connecting ideas in mathematics instruction, and we asked the teacher to teach sample lessons about slope and intercept before and after this tutorial. In response to the tutorial, the teacher enhanced his communication about links between ideas by increasing the frequency with which he expressed linked ideas multi-modally (i.e., using both speech and gesture), and by increasing the frequency with which he used simultaneous gestures to linked ideas. We then presented videos of a lesson the teacher provided before the tutorial (the baseline lesson) and one he provided after the tutorial (the enhanced-gesture lesson) to 42 seventh-grade students and assessed their learning. Students who received the enhanced-gesture lesson displayed greater learning about y-intercept than did students who received the baseline lesson. Thus, students learned more when their teacher had learned to gesture effectively.